Convert Possibilities into Business Value

Tag Archives: CloudClient

In my recent post “Look Mom, no Mouse!” I introduced an amazing new way to interact with your SDDC without a mouse, but now, using a command-line with simple mnemonic instructions you can “Talk” with your SDDC to “Automate the Management of the Management Portal”.

Create a new tenant, identity-store and adminsWhen you are logged in as administrator@vsphere.local, creating a tenant is just three commands away. To set the name of the tenant, how users will get authenticated (AD or LDAP) and who will be the adminstrators:

Here comes the fun: import/export blueprints
Until now, CloudClient commands used are merely a reproduction of what normally happens on the GUI.

Let me show where the power of it comes out: let’s assume you already created a good blueprint in a tenant with a blueprint profile and you just want to “copy&paste” it to another tenant. You cannot do it in the GUI — you need to manually recreate it — but hey, here comes the CloudClient magic: log in to the source tenant and export the blueprint in a JSON format:

Request the blueprint from the catalogThe remaining steps will be trivial as before: Create a service, an entitlement, and actions and assign the blueprint to catalog. Reading the documentation will help you to get familiar with it.

Note: “Reservations” verbs are not yet implemented, so at some point you need to use the GUI to complete the process.

So please let me fast forward to the final moment when you can successfully deploy a blueprint and see it live. 🙂

The Occam’s Razor principle: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

In my humble opinion: Please don’t waste lot of time doing everything (Coffe/Tea?) from a command-line. vRealize Automation 6.1 has a nicely improved UI and is very intuitive to work with.

Keep the solutions as simple as possible and use vRealize CloudClient when some real “black magic” is needed.

Andrea Siviero is an eight-year veteran of VMware and a senior solutions architect member of Professional Services Engineering (PSE) for the Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC), a part of the Global Technical Solutions (GTS) team.Prior to PSE, Andrea spent three years as pre-sales system engineer and three years as a post-sales consultant architect for cloud computing and desktop virtualization solutions focusing on very large and complex deployments, especially for service providers in the finance and telco sectors.